Flight 721 · Airbus A-320-232
Airbus A-320-232 · Incident: fire en route
From John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) to Lynden Pindling International Airport (NAS)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC07IA063
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Incident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- Airline
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Airbus A-320-232
- Aircraft type
- Airbus A-320
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N648JB
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), NEW YORK, NYTo Lynden Pindling International Airport (NAS), Nassau
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 121: Air Carrier
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- En route · climb to cruise
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Fire
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Cargo/baggage › Failure
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During climbout from the departure airport, a flight attendant noticed smoke coming from a bag containing camera equipment in one of the overhead bins. She extinguished the smoke, and notified the captain of the situation. He declared an emergency, and the airplane landed uneventfully at the departure airport approximately 6 minutes later. Examination of the bag containing camera equipment revealed that remnants of a 9-volt battery sustained damage consistent with a catastrophic battery failure. The main component of the 9-volt battery had a flashpoint of 21 degrees Fahrenheit, or room temperature. Other batteries, located in the same pocket of the equipment bag as the 9-volt battery, had unprotected contacts, including two fully charged 14-volt battery packs. One of the 14-volt battery packs displayed significant exterior thermal damage, consistent with damage from coming in contact with another battery. Battery industry research has revealed that a short circuit is the most common cause of battery fires, often initiated by contacts coming into contact with metal objects. Batteries are generally not designed to be able to contain catastrophic failures, and when they go into thermal runaway, they often explode and expel their contents into the environment, potentially causing ignition in areas well beyond the initiating battery cell.
Probable cause
The in-flight fire which was caused by the catastrophic failure of a 9-volt battery from an unknown cause.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC07IA063
- Event ID
- 20080409X00446
- Case number
- NYC07IA063
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, coordinates, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: c696e5d2c2a4a41ee4fc881163d4f2921d9bccf83012bb207e1f0e83af2408cc; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:47:13.708Z.